What is the greatest threat to our privacy today?
Not the NSA, but trusted American companies…
Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon purchases, frequent-flyer numbers and loyalty cards. Every day we share personal information about ourselves, usually to buy something, gain access or perks, or share a bit of our daily lives with others. Any one piece of information that we share isn’t that important, we think. Why worry?
But each bit of personal data we give out can be combined easily and with alarming speed into a personal profile that others—companies, marketing services, or more nefarious groups—can use to their own advantage. In WHAT STAYS IN VEGAS, investigative business reporter Adam Tanner penetrates the world of big data to lay bare these tactics.
Tanner goes inside one of the savviest companies using data nowadays for marketing purposes, Caesars Entertainment, whose pioneering loyalty program allows them to know more about casino-goers than their competition. Caesars knows exactly which games its customers like to play, what foods they enjoy, when they prefer to visit, who their favorite hosts and hostesses might be, and how to keep them coming back for more. The data-gathering methods at Caesars have allowed them to grow their business dramatically, and also inspired companies from across industries to ramp up their own data mining in the hopes of boosting their profitability.
But this abundance of personal data, our willingness to share it, and the trails we leave behind can also create some terrifying situations. Tanner includes cautionary tales of the trouble that individuals can get into once their data and photos land in the hands of companies that highlight the worst episodes in our lives such as mug shot website Busted! or background check sites.
We live in an age where personal information is relentlessly harvested and aggregated. We’re eager to reap the benefits—a free drink at the casino or the ease of one-click ordering—but we lose sight of the face fact that Internet giants, leading retailers, and others are gathering data with little oversight from anyone. And it is growing ever more difficult for those businesses that choose not to engage in more intrusive data gathering to compete with those that do. In WHAT STAYS IN VEGAS, Adam Tanner explores the Wild West of data capture and all the ways our personal information is driving commerce, whether we know it—or like it—or not.
